Nick Page

This Easter, why not take a walk through the events of Holy Week?

The Longest Week Live will help you to recreate the events of Holy Week right where you live. The idea is simple: during Holy Week you celebrate the events at the time they actually occurred, according to the gospel accounts, at the place they occurred, according to the gospel accounts… only where you live.

There are instructions on the Longest Week Live page along with a superimposable map of first century Jerusalem and a suggested timetable. You can do it as a group, or as an individual. Just get your walking boots on, grab a Bible and visit first century Jerusalem, right where you live.

You either love it or hate it, they say. But now even the bands of those who love it will be split into two, by the release of Marmite XO (it stands for eXtra Old). This is mature Marmite, aged Marmite, the Marmite equivalent of vielles vignes.

But now which Marmite should we Marmite lovers follow? The old Marmite or the new Marmite (although the new Marmite claims to be really older than the old one.) Because this is exactly what happens with all religions. It starts off with an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. And then some of us within the ‘us’, decide that the rest of ‘us’ are actually ‘them’. So those who are really ‘us’ form a new ‘us’. And we no longer talk to those who used to be ‘us’, because they’re not like… er… us. And, of course, like the Marmite XO, we claim to be the one true Marmite, the ancient Marmite, the kind of Marmite that the inventer of Marmite would eat were he physically with us today.

And it won’t stop there, you know, oh no. It won’t be just about the taste. Pretty soon there’ll be arguments about who’s got the better bottle, what kind of toast is the doctrinally orthodox kind and who has the more followers. And within Marmite XO itsef there will be more schism, because once you’ve split once, you’re more likely to do it again. There will be Marmite XXO and Marmite XXXO and Jurassic Marmite and Marmite Orthodox and Marmite Apostolic and Marmite Catholic.

Actually. I feel sort of hungry now. Anyone for toast?

It’s one thing to do one insanely great music video. But it’s something else to do an even better video for the same song.

And when you’ve already made the most-watched music video in the history of YouTube, then that’s just showing off.

The video, with it’s single, unbroken camera shot, took about a month and a half with around 55-60 people worked on the project in all. Eight “core builders” did the bulk of the design and building, with another 12 part-time builders and 30 recruits during the shooting to help reset the machine after each run.

It took more than 60 takes over two days to get right. There’s a making-of video here.

Genius. Collaborative Genius.

Here’s a great thing: Harry Potter books reimagined as old-style penguins.

There’s a great flickr set of classic Penguin covers here.

What I like about the Penguin covers of this period is they work fantastically, but in a very limited range of colours and set in a pretty rigid grid.

My favourite penguin covers, however, are the cookery series from the 60s, when they started using full colour wrap around photos.There’s something about them that just makes you want to rush to the market, buy everything fresh and fabulous and just start cooking.

Not only that, but inside they had great little line drawings, by artists such as John Minton, M.J. Mott and others. Perfect, perfect little books and great pieces of information design.

In April 1982, I bought a book in the University of Warwick’s bookshop. It was called Debts of Honour and it was written by Michael Foot, then leader of the Labour Party. I’ve just retrieved it from the shelf. It’s a collection of essays about Foot’s heroes – from his father Isaac Foot, to the essayist William Hazlitt; from the Tory Newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrooke to the radical’s radical, Tom Paine. It’s a brilliant book, fizzing with insight and the passion of a man talking about people he really admires. What it illustrates is the essential humanity of the man. Can you imagine a modern day politician writing in praise of someone of entirely the opposite political opinion? In fact, with a few notable exceptions, can you imagine a modern politician writing anything very interesting at all?

The book contains one of Foot’s best lines: “Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power.” Michael Foot, for all his reading, never achieved much power. Foot was a journalist and a politician, a writer for the left wing weekly Tribune in its 1940’s heyday, when the contributors included Raymond Postgate and George Orwell.
It was Foot’s glory and misfortune to be the last party leader before the spin took over. There has always been spin in politics, of course, but at that time it was just beginning its rise to power. Foot believed in principle before power. The Labour party manifesto may have been ‘the longest suicide note in history’ but it was a note based on principle, most notably the principle that everything in the manifesto had been voted for at the party conference. Things like nuclear disarmament and nationalising large parts of industry weren’t in there because he thought they would bring him to power, but because he believed in them. He wasn’t interested in what was expedient, but what he believed to be right.

He was the first political figure – at least the first one I recall – to be ridiculed by the media purely on the grounds of his appearance. He always looked like he was fighting a losing battle with his clothing. He didn’t so much wear a suit as move about at odd angles inside it. But he believed, stupidly enough, that people would be able to look beyond the suit. Sadly, though, he was dealing with papers like the Daily Mail.

I heard a story on one of the many tributes that the Tories had identified his rather eccentric appearance as a potential weak spot. They ‘let slip’, when Callaghan fell, that the person they feared most as the replacement was Michel Foot, because of his statesman like abilities. In fact they wanted Foot, because they knew that the media would have a feeding frenzy. They got what they wanted.
Today politics seems increasingly about winning power, rather than winning the argument; it’s about presentation more than principle; it’s about whether someone looks like a leader instead of whether they can actually lead.

Would he have made a good PM? I don’t think so. Certainly at the time I didn’t believe he was right. I supported the breakaway SDP. I’m more radical now. (As a Christian, I doubt somehow that Jesus is a big fan of nuclear arms. Back then, in some ways, I was a lot older than I am today.)

There was always something of the Old Testament prophet about Michael Foot – ironic, since he was a dedicated humanist, much to the regret of his parents who were staunch teetotal Methodists. Debts of Honour opens with a wonderful essay about his father, including a speech of his father’s during the war, where he predicted that, if Hitler were to invade, he would meet face ‘the land of William Tyndale and John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell and John Milton – the Britain of Marlborough… and John Wesley, of Chatham, and Burke, and Thomas Paine and Charles James Fox.’

You can see where Michael got his powers of oratory from, for whatever else he was, he was a great speaker. I’ll end with an excerpt from a speech he gave before the 1983 general election, which shows him in full, prophetic flow:

“We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer, ‘To hell with them’. The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.”

“Sow carrots in your gardens and humbly praise God for them, as for a singular and great blessing.” So wrote Richard Gardiner, in his book Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens, published in 1599 and cited in today’s Telegraph.

I never had much success with carrots. Mine always came out kind of shrivelled and stunted. But nevertheless, I love the idea of a sixteenth century gardener – any gardener, in fact – standing in their allotment and humbly praising God for the carrot. I wonder how many do give thanks for their vegetables? How many give praise for the potato? Or feel blessed by their brussels?

The great poets of the seventeenth century saw God all around them. They were sacramental poets, who recognised that the material world could reveal something of God. In the words of Paul Mariani, their language ‘pays homage to the splendid grittiness of the physical as well as to the splendor and consolation of the spiritual.’ (Quoted here)

It seems to me that we need to rediscover this kind of sacramental imagination. Christians are wary, perhaps rightly, of the kind of quasi-Buddist pantheism that sees nature as Gaia, as a kind of god. Nature isn’t God, but it can tell us about him. The Psalmist writes ‘you make the winds your messengers, fire and flame your ministers.’ (Ps 104.4) and later on in the same PSalm he gives thanks for some ordinary things:

‘You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to use,
to bring forth food from the earth,
and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine,
and bread to strengthen the human heart.’ (Ps 104.14–15)

He flings it all in in this psalm: bread, wine, olive oil, storks and cedar trees and the wild donkeys braying in the wilderness, the might of the sun and the ships on the sea and living things, great and small. These are not God, but they speak to us about him.All you have to do is learn how to look.

He doesn’t mention carrots, admittedly. But then again, he probably didn’t have an allotment.

I’m a sucker for fully-realised fantasy worlds. One of my favourite books is Islandia, an obscure, hyper-detailed creation of a pre-industrial society with its traditions, language, literature – like a cross between Tolkein and William Morris. Islandia comes, as you’d expect, with maps. It seems to me that the first rule of any proper imaginary world is that the reader should be able to map it.

I love these maps, for example, which the artist Mark Bennett has drawn up from old American TV shows and situation comedies.

My favourite ‘literary’ maps are on the backs of the Dell mapbacks. These were a series of paperbacks produced in the states, all of which had an illustrative map on the back. I managed to pick up one while I was in Canada last year, but they are hard to find in the UK.

There’s a good collection at Marble River’s Ephemera blog, notably here and here.

In Moby Dick, Ishmael says of Kokovoko, home of his companion Queequeg, ‘It is not down on any map; true places never are.’ Not on proper maps, maybe. But they are often mapped elsewhere.
As, indeed, is the case with Moby Dick itself.

And here you can view an interactive map of the voyage of the Pequod and other famous travellers.

A few interesting – indeed, startling – figures from the latest Christian Marketplace (digital version here.)

The collapse of IBS-STL has left significant creditors. Thomas Nelson is owed £174,600, Zondervan £151,000.  But the biggest creditor is Scripture Union which is claiming £360,000.

Book sales in the UK were down again in January, recording their worst month since summer 2008.

And yet more books were published in the UK last year than in any year since records began. 133,000 titles were published – up 3.2% from the previous year. That’s an astonishing 2,557 per week.

The book isn’t dead, but it is having far too many children.

Sometimes the finance industry’s lack of morals is truly breathtaking. Yesterday in Parliament politicians tried to address secretive investment funds which are making money out of debt relief for some of the poorest countries in the world. Market practitioners prefer to refer to them as distressed debt or special situations funds; others call them ‘vulture funds’.

The idea is simple. You purchase the debts of poor countries at a sizeable discount. Then you wait until the governments of those countries get a bit of money – say from debt relief from foreign creditors. Then you sue the country for repayment in full at exorbitant rates of interest. Simply put money which should be going into poverty relief and education ends up in the pockets of fund managers – usually in offshore banks. You can read more about the shabby tale here.) Their behaviour has been described as ‘extortion’ by Hans Humes, owner of New York’s Greylock Capital.

These fund managers are really just loan sharks, operating at a higher level. They are the Great Whites of the loan shark world. They are profiteering from the misery of the poor countries and the generosity of taxpayers whose governments have given debt relief.

The idea behind this bill is not that countries shouldn’t pay their debts, but that they should not have to repay beyond a fair and sustainable level. Take the case of Liberia. Two commercial creditors took a case to the UK High Court last year for a debt dating back to the 1970s on an original loan worth six million dollars and were awarded 18 million dollars – or 5% of the country’s entire annual budget. The week they filed their suit against Liberia, the Liberian capital was under siege from rebels, and had no electricity, water or a functioning government.

But then sharks always work best when they can scent blood.

Jubilee Campaign: End the Vulture Culture.

I love my village, but about once a month I also get to go up to London. If I’m lucky I’ll have some time just to wander the streets and explore, something I’ve been doing since I first went into the city on my own as a kid. (I think I must have been about 13 at the time. Not sure I’d allow my daughters to do the same today!)

Anyway, there are two wonderful love letters to London by the film critic Roger Ebert. One’s reprinted in the Guardian and is a hymn to Jermyn Street – a street I know well, since it takes me towards St James Square, home of the London Library, one of my favourite places on earth. (And Geo. F. Trumpers shops sells Limes cologne which is like rubbing half a citrus fruit on your face. But nice.) The other piece, on the joys of perambulation, is here and contains this wonderful description of a banger (as in ‘bangers and mash’): ‘Made of fat, cereals and allegedly some meat.’

Indeed, just wandering round London always brings surprises. Last summer I re-read Moby Dick and, much to my surprise, discovered it to be one of the greatest books ever written. A few weeks later, back in London, I was walking down towards the embankment when I made another discovery:

Serendipity. Another great reason to just enjoy wandering around.

Typically, some adherents have tried to claim more for this kind of wandering, and given it the name ‘psychogeography’, drawing on links to De Quincey’s drug-fuelled nocturnal perambulations and the similarly hallucinogenic writings of Iain Sinclair. I like Sinclair’s work: he’s a great stylist, and he fills every encounter with a kind of intense, meaningful significance, but really it’s still just having a wander.

Another more extreme form of wandering is the urban explorers movement, whose adherents try to enter all those strange, abandoned spaces that litter our towns, cities and countryside – the places where no-one lives or works, but where there are always signs saying ‘Keep Out’. There’s a forum here full of UK examples. I first found this forum when I was looking for information on the huge building just north of Oxford. Turns out it’s a disused grain silo. Now going into those places really must be a haunting, hallucinatory experience.

(Still just ‘wandering’ though.)

UPDATE: More fantastic bits of old London here: derelictlondon.com